Esoteric Update #152 - Iterative Evolution

Let's just kick this off with the lore:

Lore: The Road to Magedom
Lore: What Are We?

Now, updates. I really want to report a few things, and I'll start with the minor things. Bug fixes as usual, along with small but useful extensions to existing systems, in particular with new standard elements. I've also looked a bit into spicing up books with pseudofonts after someone reminded me they exist. Unfortunately, it turned out the browser I use for the game's display doesn't support drop caps out of the box, but I managed to make a reasonable facsimile, eventually:

But most of the effort got put into nonverbals. The first thing I've been tackling here is construction patterns, and I think I managed to get a good deal done with them. Here are outputs for some test parameters early on, just after I started work:

And here are the ones I got to by the end:

Both use the same parameters and essentially the same content, as I've not introduced many rules containing terminals while working on this. But I think the diversity of the output is at least a lot better, and it has the potential to get better still. Especially as content is introduced. In regards to that, I have a few hundred lines of text to chop up and convert into production rules. Many of them from Dolly, but also some more of my own design. It turned out to be a lot more than I expected at first, once I started digging into the stockpiles.

Breaking the rest of that down will be next week's focus.